Myths brought and brought by Halley
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the eastern bloc, the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the AIDS pandemic... If you look for it, it is easy to find the events announced by the visit of comet Halley in 1986. For hundreds of years the man believed that comet apparitions occurred to announce, punish or celebrate something great. The oldest record of Halley preserved in Europe, for example, has been immortalized with the feat of the conqueror of Gillen in Normandy. It arrived in 1066, when the king was preparing to conquer England and considered it a sign of triumph. And so it happened.
So we didn't know anything about comets, scientific thought wasn't developed, and it's no wonder that such a strong myth arose around comets. In 1986 no one associated Comet Halley with any disaster of human civilization.
This does not mean that knowledge has made the myth of comets disappear. And it is that, as we know what comets were and how they moved, we also learned that they have collided with the Earth and that they can do, and we replace one terror, one myth, with another. Comets would have nothing to do with the transit of kings, conquerors and religions, but (along with asteroids) they can have the ability to put an end to human civilization and therefore they are panic bodies. Of this new kind of terror he complained that Isaac Asimov was awaiting Halley's appearance in the book written in 1985. But the human capacity to create myths is unlimited...
Above all fears, but it is undeniable that comet Halley has been a gift for the human being. On man's path to science and rational thought, the comet we have been able to see so often and so brilliantly has been an agent. As astronomer Cristina Zuza points out in the following pages, Halley is an exception among comets, a fortunate exception.
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